Precisely 120 027 card-carrying Socialists on Wednesday night dictated the fate not just of their own party but quite possibly of the European Union as they voted on the new European Union Constitution.
The official results of the finely balanced internal referendum, which follows a bitter three-month debate that has split France’s main opposition party, will not be announced until Friday, although reasonably accurate estimates are expected early this morning.
The outcome is anxiously awaited by other EU leaders, by the French president, Jacques Chirac, and not least by the party hierarchy.
For all of them the ballot on the blunt question: ”Do you, yes or no, approve the EU Constitution?” could have far-reaching consequences.
”In a way, about 100 000 French citizens hold the key to the Constitution,” the European Parliament’s president, Josip Borrell, said this month, reflecting fears that a no vote by the Socialists would make it hard for Chirac to deliver the treaty’s ratification in a referendum next spring.
France’s radical left and sovereigntist right are already fiercely opposed, and without Socialist backing it is hard to see Chirac winning. Since the Constitution requires backing from all 25 member states, a French ”non” would stop the whole project before most countries (including Britain) can express an opinion.
France’s Parti Socialiste has traditionally been staunchly pro-European and its founding father, the late François Mitterrand, was one of the great architects of integration. A rejection of the Constitution would leave the party isolated: no other Socialist party except Belgium’s has such misgivings.
The rest of Europe’s mainstream left, from the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, to Spain’s prime minister, José Luis RodrÃÂguez Zapatero, while admitting the text is not perfect, broadly back the Constitution. They say it is the best deal available and that if it fails, the European project will be set back decades.
Britain’s Europe minister, Denis MacShane, told Le Monde that the French Socialists’ no camp, headed by the former prime minister Laurent Fabius, had succumbed to populism and demagoguery. ”Laurent Fabius and his friends are the new Cathars of Europe,” he said.
”They want a pure Europe, whereas it is a question of making the actual Europe work better. They will simply succeed in rendering it immobile. The Constitution is neither leftwing nor rightwing — it is neutral. What counts is the political will of Europe’s governments.”
Fabius and two smaller groups in the Socialist party argue that as it stands, the Constitution does not reflect their concerns. It is, they say, long on competition and the free market and short on employee rights and social protection: an Anglo-Saxon capitalist conspiracy.
They claim the draft could hinder efforts to create jobs and to stop firms migrating to countries with lower taxes. ”The constitution will lead us to a liberal Europe, undoing what we have done over 40 years,” Fabius has said.
Many French Socialists are also reluctant to again side with Chirac, having done so against their instincts in 2002 to ensure the defeat of the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (who is himself vehemently opposed to the EU Constitution, leading those Socialists who back it to declare that a vote against the treaty is ”a vote for Le Pen”).
Whatever the outcome of the vote, the campaign that has pitted Fabius, the party’s number two, against its leader, François Hollande, has destroyed party unity and, after a year of sweeping triumphs in regional, local and European elections, severely set back its efforts to regain power in 2007.
For many in the yes camp, Fabius’s stance stems not from political conviction but from a desire to win the nomination for the next presidential elections — by appealing to that substantial part of Socialist opinion that remains uncomfortable with the precepts of a market economy and reluctant to bid farewell to a Europe run in accordance with the French way of doing things.
The political future of President Chirac’s favoured successor, Alain Juppé, was revived on Wednesday when an appeals court reduced from 10 years to one year the ban on holding elected office imposed in January for his role in a 1980s party financing scandal.
This means Juppé could theoretically stand in the 2007 presidential election, but since being sentenced he has largely withdrawn from politics. He was Chirac’s first prime minister, in 1995-97. – Guardian Unlimited Â